My suggestion is, in addition to using the videos and courses for background knowledge, to take up and work on a (non-homework) project, to truly explore the ar

My suggestion is, in addition to using the videos and courses for background knowledge, to take up and work on a (non-homework) project, to truly explore the area. For eg., Betty [1] is quite an interesting project with both real-life use and practical NLP considerations, and is looking for new maintainers. (I'm not affiliated, just interested in NLP myself and have been itching to get into betty for some time.) If you like thinking about game design, there's also the option of Interactive Fiction [2], NLP-involving ones are called parser-based fictions I believe. A recent FLOSS podcast episode with folks from the IF Tech Foundation was pretty interesting and illuminating regarding this area. [1] https://github.com/pickhardt/betty https://github.com/pickhardt/betty [2] http://iftechfoundation.org/frequently-asked-questions/ http://iftechfoundation.org/frequently-asked-questions/